Enemy of Entropy

Good Reads Migration Finished!

17 August 2008, 11:50 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Family, Geekery, Health, RPGs, Reading.

That was not pain­less at all. The import fea­ture is tetchy, at best. I had to go through the entire list of 1300+ books and fix their “book­shelf” assign­ments, and add some that just didn’t import at all. I had over 1400 books in Now Read­ing, and I haven’t quite fig­ured out why there are fewer books in Good Reads. Oh well. It’s pretty much done!

The dates I’d read books, my rat­ings, and my reviews did NOT trans­fer to Good Reads, which is highly annoying.

I was able to go through and update a bunch of books that I’ve read since NR stopped work­ing, and use the to-​​read cat­e­gory to request books from the library. As a result, there are 33 books await­ing pickup now, and another 61 pend­ing (mostly books that are really new or not yet avail­able). That doesn’t include the inter-​​library loan items I requested.1

Sam and I had bonus gam­ing time tonight. He’s stor­ing up brownie points before Dragon*Con. Katie, unfor­tu­nately, couldn’t sleep last night, then slept all day until about 11:30. Now she’s re-​​hydrating and get­ting some food now. I hope she can go back to sleep. She’s def­i­nitely hav­ing a fibro flare. :-(

1 I’m so tick­led that the library added a way to put in ILL requests online!

Grrr

15 July 2008, 10:14 pm. Comments Off. Filed under Blogging.

The lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press is out, so I upgraded this blog right away, as I usu­ally do. Of course, the plu­gin I use most, Now Read­ing, choked and won’t work any more.

Le sigh.

The prob­lems with the pre­vi­ous “new” WP ver­sion were never truly resolved, and now the author’s forum isn’t work­ing, either. I fig­ure he has an actual pay­ing job, so I can’t fuss too much. But I’m still disappointed.

Amazon Weirdness

14 June 2008, 11:55 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Geekery, Reading.

I’m tired. I spent entirely too much time over the last 48 hours futz­ing with the library part of this site.

The soft­ware I use to cre­ate that, Now Read­ing, auto­mat­i­cally pulls images of book cov­ers from Ama­zon when­ever I add a book to the library. Ama­zon auto­mat­i­cally sets affil­i­ate links up that way, so they’ve already said they don’t mind (there are affil­i­ate links to them on every page, so they are get­ting their traf­fic). I don’t usu­ally hotlink to any­thing, but some com­pa­nies actu­ally pre­fer it.

For some rea­son, the images keep going away ran­domly. Some are for older books, but some are for fairly new releases, too. Ama­zon still has an image on their pages, but the graph­ics have moved on their servers.

I know they’ve tried to get their affil­i­ates to use their dynamically-​​generated wid­gets, which would pre­sum­ably update them­selves when a file is moved. I don’t care. I want to link to spe­cific items that I’ve read or want to read or want to talk about, not what­ever their algo­rithms decide to link to.

Now I get to go through all 600+ books in the library, find images for their cov­ers, save same to my server, and update the library records.

Foo.

Gravatars and Plugins and WordPress, Oh My!

5 April 2008, 11:03 pm. 8 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

Since Word­Press 2.5 has Gra­vatar sup­port, I’m attempt­ing to add Gra­vatars to my blog tem­plate. Unfor­tu­nately, I just keep get­ting errors, or a the default “no Gra­vatars” image (even for com­ment authors who I know have Gra­vatars, like me). I’m cer­tain that the author of this tem­plate isn’t going to update it to include sup­port, because her web site and busi­ness are up for sale. She hasn’t ever responded to ques­tions in the past, either, so I fig­ure it’s silly to look for help there.

I tried on another tem­plate, with the same errors. I really don’t want to switch themes again, because I couldn’t even start to remem­ber every­thing I’ve cus­tomized in this one, and I’d rather not do it all over again. I’m annoyed, though. If any­one can help me, I’d appre­ci­ate it!

Update: Squee! They’re work­ing now! The clue I needed was in a post at Weblog Tools Col­lec­tion. Now I can try updat­ing the other blogs!

Oth­er­wise, Now Read­ing is work­ing now, thanks to help from the author. I’m thrilled, as it’s one of my favorite plug-​​ins. When I get Read­er­Ware set up for us again, I’ll try to fig­ure out a way to export data from it to NR.

Cys­tats is not work­ing, though. I didn’t even real­ize that it was bro­ken at first, because the error only shows up for users who aren’t logged in. Oddly enough, it works on some blogs that are run­ning 2.5, but not this one. The author of that plug-​​in hasn’t responded to my ques­tions, though. It might be due to a lan­guage bar­rier, as his blog is writ­ten in Ger­man. Now it’s work­ing again, as ran­domly as it quit work­ing. Why? Who knows? If you see an error on the site at any time, please com­ment and let me know!

I just real­ized that Live­jour­nal Cross­post also died in the upgrade. For­tu­nately, there’s a fix described in the issues board at the devel­op­ment site that should make it work again.

Now I get to go back and see how many posts didn’t go to LJ, and try to fix that lit­tle omission.

WordPress Upgrade Woes

30 March 2008, 8:53 pm. 7 Comments. Filed under Blogging, Geekery.

Ack! I upgraded to the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press (2.5) yes­ter­day, and now one of my favorite plug-​​ins (Now Read­ing) isn’t work­ing! You can see the books I’m read­ing at the moment over there in the side­bar, and I can get into the admin­is­tra­tive inter­face, but the library dis­play doesn’t work. Any of the actual book or author pages come up 404. Meep!

It isn’t just on this blog, either—Fibrant Liv­ing has the same problem.

The WP admin­is­tra­tive inter­face has been com­pletely redesigned. I’m not sure what might have been changed behind the scenes, so I’m a lit­tle wor­ried about try­ing to go back to the pre­vi­ous version.

I’ve posted mes­sages in the plug-​​in author’s forum and bug tracker. I’m hop­ing to hear from him soon! Rob actu­ally responded in the com­ments, and the new ver­sion resolved the prob­lem. Yay!

 

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